ARM (Cambridge, England) did not indicate how long the deal will last or the size of the initial licensing payment that Open-Silicon will pay.

The agreement enables Open Silicon (Milpitas, Calif.) to offer customers access to the latest ARM technology complemented by the provision of SoC design, hardening, prototyping, software development and manufacturing services. Open-Silicon will use ARM technology to provide chip design services for networking, telecommunications, storage and computing markets. System security requirements for the protection of high-value data can be met through the careful application of ARM's TrustZone technology.

Open-Silicon offers FPGA-based prototyping to help software teams prior the completion of IC design and provides its own CoreMax, PowerMax and VariMax technologies, related to the power efficiency of ICs.

"As the demand for low-power products continues to drive the marketplace we believe our customers will benefit significantly from the combination of our first class design services and the latest ARM technology," said Naveed Sherwani, president and CEO of Open-Silicon, in a statement issued by ARM.

"The agreement paves the way for increased adoption of the ARM architecture across a wide range of end markets, such as the use of the Cortex-A5 processor in home gateway solutions," said Lance Howarth, executive vice president of marketing at ARM, in the same statement.

Can you be more specific how firms like Open Silicon, e-Silicon can further optimize power efficiency? Do they even have internal capability to address this?? Not that they should not try these kind of efforts but sounds like you're overestimating fabless ASIC houses' capabilities.